Bob Dylan’s annus mirabilis was 1965, the year he would transform popular music with two extraordinary albums that brought a new wit and literacy to rock’n’roll, and an electric immediacy to poetry.
At the time, however, the presence of an amplified rock band on Bringing It All Back Home was widely viewed more as a defection from folk music than a breakthrough to an exciting new mode of expression. Eyebrows were raised and letters were written within a folk-singing community lulled into pessimism by the sort of dreary protest balladry that Bob had grown out of a couple of years before. Rather than acknowledge his ambition, they denounced him as a sell-out.
In one sense, they were right: Bringing It All Back Home would be Dylan’s first million-seller, reaching the US Top Ten and going on to top the LP charts in Britain, where Bob-mania reached such a pitch that in May 1965 he would achieve the rare feat of having three albums in the Top Ten (the others being The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which also reached the top, and The Times They Are A-Changin’). But what old folkies saw as an abject surrender of commitment to commerce, Dylan viewed more in terms of his constituency, which suddenly expanded exponentially, and his own artistic needs, which were being satisfied more completely than before.
Others were able to view the situation from a more revealing perspective than the insular folk community. Through much of 1964/5, the photographer Daniel Kramer had the opportunity to spend time with Dylan, photographing him intermittently over the course of several months—mostly unposed stuff, but including both the recording sessions for Bob’s next album, and its cover photo. As the months passed, he grew astonished at the changes in Dylan. “In just one year, not only his songs but his very appearance changed radically,” Kramer noted. “He was new all the time.”
Most of late 1964 was taken up with Dylan’s Fall Tour—on which Joan Baez appeared frequently as a “surprise” guest—though his burgeoning celebrity increasingly brought him into contact with the era’s glitterati. He attended a party for Robert Kennedy at Miles Davis’s house; and in August, Bob and journalist Al Aronowitz introduced The Beatles to the enigmatic charm of marijuana while the Fab Four were staying at New York’s Delmonico Hotel. The group had had a profound influence on Dylan earlier that year, when they dominated the nation’s airwaves during his cross-country trip. “They were doing things nobody was doing,” he told biographer Anthony Scaduto later. “Their chords were outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians… I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
This conviction grew during the Fall Tour, as Bob grew increasingly bored with the cozy conventions of his acoustic shows. “Out front it was a sure thing,” he explained in a summer 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston. “I knew what the audience was gonna do, how they would react. It was very automatic. Your mind just drifts unless you can find some way to get in there and remain totally there.” To a friend, he admitted his dissatisfaction with what had become a routine: “I play these concerts and I ask myself, ‘Would you come to see me tonight?’—and I’d have to truthfully say, ‘No, I wouldn’t come. I’d rather be doin’ something else, really I would.’ That something else is rock. That’s where it’s at for me. My words are pictures, and the rock’s gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures.”
The future, clearly, was electric. Bob had started to feel the tremors of a new rock approach in the Greenwich Village scene when he played (as “Bob Landy”) on an album of blues covers by old friends like Dave Van Ronk, Ric Von Schmidt and “Spider” John Koerner. Called The Blues Project, it featured an electric backing band which included Al Kooper, Danny Kalb and Steve Katz, who later took the album’s title for their band name. And in June 1964, Dylan had been mightily impressed when he attended some sessions at which John Hammond Jr.—the bluesman son of the legendary Columbia A&R man—recorded his album So Many Roads with a backing band that included guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and several members of a Canadian band, The Hawks, who had once backed rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. The clincher, though, came in August, when the English R&B group The Animals—who had already had a hit in Britain with what was basically a souped-up version of ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ from Bob’s first album—topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with an electrified version of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, too. If they could do it, why not Bob himself?
Tom Wilson felt much the same way, and without Dylan’s knowledge, went into the studios that December to overdub rock backing on to three of Bob’s old songs: ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, the unreleased ‘Rocks And Gravel’, and ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ itself. The results were not as successful as he had hoped, though he would later experience spectacular success when he employed the same approach to modernize Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound Of Silence’, which kick-started the duo’s career after they had all but given up. (Simon only learned of his chart-topping success while on a solo tour of England.) But the sessions undoubtedly helped Wilson get some idea of the dynamics of rock-group recording, which were put to devastatingly effective use when Bob and a band of musicians cut Bringing It All Back Home over three days in mid-January 1965.
Dylan had retired to the relative seclusion of Woodstock to finish writing some new material a few weeks before the sessions, arriving with 18 songs ready to record. Some, though, had been longer in gestation: at his Halloween concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on October 31, 1964, he gave standout performances of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, three of the highlights of the upcoming album.
These new songs were unlike anything he had written before, packed with images which sparked back and forth between anti-authoritarian cynicism, existentialist immediacy and ribald satire, offering up a surrealist distorting mirror to modern life, American history and interpersonal relations. There were stories in some of them, but not the straightforward kind his fans were used to; these stories took absurd twists and turns, and seemed to mock the listener’s desire for strict narrative continuity. And while it was obvious that ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’, in particular, were offering considered critiques of society, their “messages” seemed diffuse and poetic, rather than cut-and-dried. As one reviewer wrote of a 1965 Dylan concert: “Dylan used to sound like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant.”
Dylan had devised a new mode of expression which took his primary poetic influences—the Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud and Villon, the folk vernacular of Woody Guthrie, the immediacy of beat writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac, the visionary awareness of William Blake, and the hipster slang of beat comics like Hugh (“Wavy Gravy”) Romney and Lord Buckley—and lashed them to a driving rock beat. Even the songs which didn’t feature the full rock backing seemed somehow informed by it, hovering over their ostensible subjects like ghostly allusions to a more powerful presence. “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word,” he told Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston. “I’m a trapeze artist.” And to Robert Shelton, he said, “What I write is much more concise now than before. It’s not deceiving.”
The first day of the recording sessions featured just Dylan with, on a couple of songs, John Sebastian on bass (later leader of The Lovin’ Spoonful); none of these acoustic takes made it on to the album. The next two days, 14 and 15 January, he re-recorded several of the same tracks, plus the rest of the album, accompanied by a band that comprised Bobby Gregg on drums, Paul Griffin on piano, Bruce Langhorne and Kenny Rankin on guitars, and either Joseph Macho Jr. or William E. Lee on bass. Though Tom Wilson was the producer, the arrangements were very much down to Dylan, who passed from one musician to another, explaining what he wanted, sometimes demonstrating parts on the piano, until the pieces came together as he desired. “Dylan worked like a painter,” reported Daniel Kramer, “covering a huge canvas with the colors that the different musicians could supply him, adding depth and dimension to the total work.”
Most of the tracks needed only three or four takes, during which time the song might mutate slightly in terms of tempo or phrasing. Sometimes they got it first time out. Other times, things didn’t go quite that smoothly. At one point, distracted by the “obstacle course” of microphone stands and bits of furniture that Wilson had secretly arranged around the microphone to try and keep him stationary while he was doing his vocals, Dylan blew up in mid-take, storming across the room with a chair, before acknowledging his momentary peevishness with a self-deprecatory smile. ‘Outlaw Blues’, an overnight re-write of the previous day’s acoustic ‘California’, took some time to crystallize into its final form, but that was very much the exception. On the final day of the sessions, Dylan recorded ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ and ‘Gates Of Eden’ in one long take, without stopping to hear a playback between tracks. (Before he started, he instructed the engineers not to make any mistakes, because they were long numbers and he didn’t want to do them more than once.)
With ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ put out as a trailer a few weeks before, Bringing It All Back Home was released in late March 1965, in a sleeve which indicated how far Dylan had moved on from the denim-clad troubadour of his early records, and hinted at the complexity of the new album’s contents. With Daniel Kramer, Bob devised a cover photo featuring himself and an elegant brunette dressed in red (Albert Grossman’s wife Sally) reclining, unsmiling, upon a chaise-longue amid a clutter of bric-a-brac, magazines and long-playing records (by Lotte Lenya, The Impressions, Eric Von Schmidt and Robert Johnson) which Kramer arranged so as to have them “move” around Dylan. Bob’s last album Another Side Of Bob Dylan is toward the back of the shot, almost in the fireplace.
Above the mantelpiece is a colored-glass collage of a clown face which Dylan had made for Bernard Paturel, the owner of Bernard’s Cafe in Woodstock, where Bob played chess and frequently took refuge from the pressures of fame in an upstairs room which the Paturels kept vacant for him. The cute gray kitten Bob is cuddling is his pet, Rollin’ Stone—though there is a pronounced feline grace about all three of the photo’s subjects, who share a disquieting air of luxuriant sensuousness which might at any moment reveal its claws. On the rear sleeve, a spread of Kramer’s photos depicting Dylan with artists such as Baez, Allen Ginsberg (in a top hat), Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) and filmmaker Barbara Rubin (giving Bob a head-massage) hint at the growing hubbub surrounding the singer, while the discursive sleeve-note features his musings upon life, poetry and song in a chunk of beat-styled prose indicative of the book he was working on, which would be published some years later as Tarantula. It all made for a package of great mystique and sophistication, a giant step beyond anything which the pop world had encountered before.
As the earliest example of Bob Dylan’s new electric sound, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ marks a pivotal moment in his career. Together with the accompanying extract from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary film Don’t Look Back, which served as one of the first (and still the best) pop promo clips, its effect was seismic, gaining Dylan his first American Top 40 entry and his second UK Top-Ten hit (hot on the heels of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, which had belatedly stormed up the charts in March 1965), and securing his reputation as the hottest cat on two continents.
Stylistically, the song is a three-way cross between Chuck Berry, Jack Kerouac and a Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger song called ‘Taking It Easy’, whose repetitive structure (“Mom was in the kitchen, preparing to eat, Sis was in the pantry looking for some yeast…”) Dylan parodies both here and in the next album’s ‘Tombstone Blues’. Injected with R&B energy, the machine-gun patter of words tumbling after each other takes as its closest precedent the rock’n’roll poetry of Chuck Berry, in particular ‘Too Much Monkey Business’—though it’s perhaps the eponymous hero of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ whose hopped-up, streetwise doppelganger we find “mixing up the medicine” at the beginning of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Subsequent references to drug busts and police surveillance, and the generally paranoiac tone of the song, suggest that our Johnny is a drug chemist, synthesizing his wares in the basement.
Dylan was by this time no stranger to drugs. Pot-smoking had been commonplace on the folk scene long before his arrival in Greenwich Village, and was an essential element of that February’s cross-country trip. According to producer Paul Rothchild, he and Victor Maimudes had themselves introduced Dylan to LSD a few months earlier, following a Spring 1964 concert at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “I looked at the sugar cubes and thought, ‘Why not?’” Rothchild told Bob Spitz. “So we dropped acid on Bob. Actually, it was an easy night for Dylan. Everybody had a lot of fun. If you ask me, that was the beginning of the mystical Sixties right there.”
It was certainly the beginning of a new phase of Dylan’s career, although, despite his “pro-chemistry” outlook, he later denied that drugs had that much of an influence on his songwriting, but had simply served to heighten his “awareness of the minute.” Rather than write sermons for tomorrow, he chose to focus on the present, a choice which manifested itself in a restless search for kicks and a refusal to attempt to shoehorn experience into tidy moral platitudes.
Not that he had completely abandoned protest. Far from it: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ remains the most concise compendium of anti-establishment attitude Dylan ever composed, just over two minutes crammed with beat cynicism and drug paranoia, in which virtually every couplet can be abstracted as a slogan. (Most have been.) Indeed, so powerful was its effect that a group of militant underground activists, the Weathermen, chose their name from one such slogan, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” What was different from his earlier message-song style was the cynical, streetwise nihilism of the song, whose third and fourth verses condense a generation’s disquiet with the American Dream lifestyle into a few succinct phrases, while offering only the most nugatory, absurd advice on how to deal with it. There was no specific victim in the song, and no message other than the recurrent “Look out kid” to warn of society’s manifold traps and dead-end diversions.
For Joan Baez, this was a step in the wrong direction, as too was what she viewed as his negative, “death-trip” lifestyle at the time. “He criticizes society and I criticize it,” she explained to Robert Shelton, “but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite. I am afraid the message that comes through from Dylan in 1965 and 1966 is: ‘Let’s all go home and smoke pot, because there’s nothing else to do… we might as well go down smoking.’” But what Baez viewed as defeatist actually proved inspirational for a much wider audience than the one to which she and Dylan had previously been preaching: faced with the apparent absurdity of modern life and its institutions, an entire generation recognized the zeitgeist in the verbal whirlwind of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.
The track made a fitting opening to Don’t Look Back, in a classic sequence where Dylan, standing in an alleyway alongside London’s Savoy Hotel, drops cards bearing words and phrases from the song, trying to keep pace as the declamatory deluge pours forth. (The cards had been marked up the previous evening, by Dylan, Donovan—who crashed on the floor of Bob’s suite for a few nights during his stay—Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth. At the song’s conclusion, the latter pair stroll across the alley, following Dylan out of the frame.)
Written at the apartment of John Court, an associate of Albert Grossman’s, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was recorded on January 14, 1965, after Dylan had done a solo acoustic run-through the day before. Though he was working with a band for the first time, he seems remarkably at ease—indeed, compared with the nagging, monotonous delivery of the previous day, when Dylan (like so many since) experienced some difficulty making all the lines scan, he sounds audibly freed up by the band, effortlessly riding the R&B bounce of Bobby Gregg’s drums while Kenny Rankin pierces the song’s fabric with little exclamation-mark stabs of electric guitar. Amazingly, it was done in one take.
The two love songs on Bringing It All Back Home are decidedly different in character from Dylan’s earlier romantic compositions. Just as the wistful longing of early songs like ‘Girl From The North Country’ had been replaced by the bitter recrimination and melancholy of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and ‘To Ramona’ on Another Side Of Bob Dylan, so that is in turn supplanted here by an ambivalent tribute that veers between acquiescent devotion and subliminally mild contempt, the latter cunningly concealed by the gentleness of Dylan’s delivery and the sensitivity of the backing. The key to the song is the bluntly possessive title, which runs so counter to Dylan’s anti-materialist attitude that it can only be intended ironically, suggesting that the song’s apparent affection should likewise be taken with a pinch of salt.
The references in ‘She Belongs To Me’ to the subject’s status as an artist and her ownership of an Egyptian ring suggest that it was written for Joan Baez, to whom Bob had once given just such a ring. The song pays due tribute to her self-assertiveness and unbreakable moral conviction (“She never stumbles/She’s got no place to fall”), but characterizes her interest in the narrator as that of a dilettante art collector whose gaze effectively transforms the object of her affections into an antique—presumably a reference to Baez’s patronage of Dylan, her desire to keep him as her pet protest singer, rather than let him develop according to his own desires. Even the apparently obsequious devotion of the final verse masks a condemnation of a lover whose obsessive demands for compliments and attention have fatally wearied the relationship.
Bob and Joan’s relationship had been eroding for the past year, but as with the earlier situation between Bob and Suze, he had not been able to call it quits. Instead, he allowed the relationship to deteriorate slowly, until she could stand no more and was forced to break things off. Joan had had misgivings for some time about the divergent direction their careers appeared to be taking, which were crystallized when he suggested to her that they play at Madison Square Garden. “I’m scared,” she told him. “I think what it means is that you’ll be the rock’n’roll king, and I’ll be the peace queen.” Dylan scoffed at her fear, but she was right: while her sense of liberal concern expanded to accommodate the diverse needs of her audience, he had come to the realization that to accept responsibility for “those kids” would stifle his muse, that he would become a walking antique unless he cast off all responsibilities except for those he had for his art.
Baez dates the watershed point of their relationship to a bi-coastal telephone conversation they had in 1964 during which, while they were joking about getting married, she had demurred, saying it would never work out. From that point, she claims, Dylan’s attitude toward her changed, eventually coming to a head on the 1965 tour of England covered in Don’t Look Back. She had accepted his invitation to accompany him to Europe, believing it would be a reciprocation of her American shows, at which she had introduced him to her audience. But Dylan never invited her up on stage with him, leaving her forlornly in the wings as he basked in adulation. In the film, the distance between the two of them is plain to see in the hotel-room scenes where Joan vainly serenades Bob while he, oblivious, continues working on his book.
Worse still, the vicious banter that Dylan and Bob Neuwirth dealt in was increasingly aimed in her direction. In one of the film’s cruelest scenes, after the three of them have traded Hank Williams songs in a backstage dressing-room, she admits to feeling tired. “I’m fagging out,” she explains. “Let me tell you, sister,” ripostes Neuwirth, quick as a flash, “you fagged out a long time ago!” Then, stepping further over the mark of propriety, he says to Dylan, “Hey, she’s got one of those see-through blouses that you don’t even wanna!” Unable to keep up with such insults, Joan flounces out of the room. Shortly afterward, things came to a head between Joan and Bob and, distraught, she left the tour and flew on to her parents’ place in Paris.
At the final day of the Bringing It All Back Home recording sessions, according to photographer Daniel Kramer, Bob and his musicians were elated when they managed to kick off proceedings with a storming version of ‘Maggie’s Farm’. This, combined with the simplicity of its blues structure, may explain why Dylan chose the song to open his ill-fated performance with the Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
‘Maggie’s Farm’ was probably inspired by ‘Penny’s Farm’, a song from Pete Seeger’s first album which criticized the meanness of a landlord, George Penny. In Dylan’s song, the criticism is less specific and, crucially, less earnest: the eponymous farm has expanded to take in the entire country’s system of labor relations, which are ridiculed through the three-fold impact of the song’s imagery, Dylan’s bitingly sardonic delivery, and the rebellious ebullience of the backing. The song is virtually a shorthand précis of the Marxist analysis of the alienating condition of capitalism upon the workers—indeed, so alienated from the fruits of his labor is the narrator that we never learn exactly what kind of work it is that he’s involved in. What we do learn about, in a series of cartoonish vignettes, is the small-minded nepotism and petty officialdom of most company organizations; the old ties between capital, the institutions of government and the church; and the grinding boredom of manual labor, especially when inflicted upon those workers who still retain a little imagination and a few ideas of their own.
The final verse concludes with a damning indictment of the way that, post-Henry Ford, modern assembly-line manufacturing methods impose uniformity on the labor force just as much as on the goods manufactured. Of course, Dylan is not fool enough to believe he is exempt from such forces, and so the last verse also becomes an explicit condemnation of all those folk fans and commentators who criticized his various changes of lyrical style—including, ironically, Pete Seeger himself, who had to be restrained from taking an ax to the power-cables that fed Dylan’s electric band at the Newport Folk Festival that year.
The second of the album’s love songs is more straightforwardly devotional than ‘She Belongs To Me’, despite the dark, looming energy of much of its imagery. The first verse is as close as Dylan gets to amorous infatuation, marveling at a lover of elemental constancy and rock-like imperturbability, one whose emotional strength is not dependent on overt displays of emotion, but on some deeper, inner fortitude. The three remaining verses then offer a parade of the inauthentic chaos which routinely assaults the narrator’s sensibilities, from which his lover’s devotion provides him with necessary refuge: critics dissect, rich girls presume, bridges tremble, statues crumble—but through it all, she remains untouched, unaffected, smiling with the knowing, Zen-like calm of the Mona Lisa. By the song’s conclusion, she occupies his thoughts as completely as the eponymous bird obsesses the hapless protagonist of Poe’s The Raven—although the closing image of the bird with the broken wing tapping at the narrator’s window could simply be an expression of her essential vulnerability, despite that inner strength he so admires.
In its admiration for a lover who “knows too much to argue or to judge,” the song is surely inspired by Sara Lowndes, the former model and Playboy bunny with whom Bob had become involved some time in late 1964, and whom he would marry in a secret wedding ceremony in November 1965. A divorcee friend of Bringing It All Back Home cover star Sally Grossman, Sara was a frequent visitor to the Grossmans’ Woodstock spread, but lived with her young daughter Maria in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where Bob took an apartment in order to be close to her. It was Sara, through her work connections at Drew Associates, a film-production company, who introduced Bob and his manager to the young cinema-verité filmmaker Donn Pennebaker, who would go on to make the Don’t Look Back documentary.
Apart from her great natural beauty, what probably attracted Bob to Sara was her Zen-like equanimity: unlike most of the women he met, she wasn’t out to impress him, or to interrogate him about his lyrics. An adherent of Eastern mysticism, she possessed a certain ego-less quality which dovetailed neatly with Bob’s more pronounced sense of ambition. Indeed, so self-effacing was she that for a long time their relationship remained a secret even to Dylan’s friends, most of whom learned about their marriage several months after it had occurred.
Encouraged by his Buddhist friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, Dylan was at this time becoming increasingly interested in Eastern mysticism himself, particularly the I Ching, the ancient oriental Oracle Of Change. “You gotta read the I Ching,” he told friends. “I don’t wanna talk about it, except to say it’s the only thing that’s fantastically true. You read it, and you gotta know it’s true. It’s something to believe in. Of course,” he added with a Zen-like touch of self-contradiction, “I don’t believe in anything.”
Originally rehearsed in acoustic form as ‘California’—under which title it appeared on several bootlegs—‘Outlaw Blues’ is the most raw and basic of Dylan’s early electric outings, a churning twelve-bar blues grind of rhythm guitars that just chugs onward, over and over, like a runaway sixteen-wheeler truck barreling down a highway, leaving gusts of harmonica and slivers of lead guitar trailing like leaves in its wake. As a performance, it could have been designed specifically to raise the hackles of his discomfited folkie fans, while the studied absurdity of the lyrics might also have been devised to annoy those who demanded meaning from his songs—and, increasingly, from Dylan himself. Hardly an interview or press conference would pass without Bob being asked to explain his songs, which is probably why the second verse finds Dylan watching his back, refusing to hang any specific opinions out in public view for fear of being shot down, the way Jesse James was shot in the back by Robert Ford while putting up a picture.
Two verses later, he returns to the same theme, with a damning vernacular finality that cuts both ways, through both his own oracular ability and his interrogators’ motives: “Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’/I just might tell you the truth.” And that, he implies, would be the last thing anyone would want.
As the first side approaches its end, Dylan slips into the parade of comic grotesques that would increasingly populate his songs over the course of the next few albums. A paranoid, nightmarish version of the in-law dread that affects every courting couple, ‘On The Road Again’ opens with the most standard of blues beginnings—the narrator waking up in the morning—but instead of the string of clichés that are usually on a bluesman’s mind, he’s plunged here into a surreal netherworld where the mother-in-law lives in the refrigerator, father-in-law wears a mask of Napoleon, grandfather-in-law carries a sword-stick, and frogs inhabit his socks. Even the simplest tasks—eating, stroking a pet—become laden with pitfalls, while the most mundane and innocent of delivery-men and servants are imbued with a sinister, premonitory presence. No wonder, then, that Bob refuses to move in on a permanent basis.
The mutant rock’n’roll offspring of his various humorous talking blues, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ bears no relation at all to the wistful reverie of the original ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’. Over the course of the intervening 113 dreams, Dylan’s dream-world has presumably become less personal but much more frantic, judging by the pace of this recording and the vitality of its imagery.
The song is a satiric dream vision of the discovery of America in which images, scenes and references dissolve into each other, so that the Mayflower can be captained by a cartoon version of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab—here re-named “Arab” for dumb comic effect—who, upon sighting America, abandons his quest for the whale in favor of buying up the land with beads and imposing the principles of property ownership upon a people for whom it has no meaning. Jailed alongside the rest of the crew for carrying harpoons, the narrator breaks out and goes in search of help for his shipmates, who remain unaccountably imprisoned.
From there, the narrative rattles along with the berserk logic of dreams (at one point, a foot bursts out of a telephone), while riding roughshod over such sacred establishment cows as the flag, police, religion and capitalism. Like the dysfunctional family of ‘On The Road Again’, this dream-America is fraught with ludicrous dangers and inexplicable sights: exploding desserts, runaway bowling-balls, talking cows, predatory French girls, paranoid coast guards and, of course, naval traffic wardens, all of whom exert their influence on our hero. Eventually tiring of his ordeal, the narrator returns to the ship and sets off back across the ocean, passing en route a ship bearing a certain Christopher Columbus, to whom he offers, more in sympathy than hope, “Good luck.”
The surreal imagery of ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ led many to suppose that this was one of the first “drug songs” for which Dylan and his peers would become notorious. There were, however, precedents for the song’s loopy, extempore style in Bob’s youth, according to his teenage buddy John Bucklen, who recalled that the pair of them would pass many evenings ad-libbing nonsense songs. “We’d get a guitar and sing verses we made up as we went along,” he told Robert Shelton. “It came out strange and weird. We thought we’d send them in somewhere, but we never did.”
The song’s false start came about when the backing musicians missed their cue, but Bob kept on singing, cracking up with laughter a line or two into the song, along with producer Tom Wilson and everyone else—though only Dylan’s hilarity was caught on tape. He insisted the mistake should be retained on the album, telling Wilson he would even be prepared to pay for its inclusion. Edited on to the beginning of a bona-fide band take, the laughter sets up the tenor of the song, and makes the band’s entrance all the more dynamic.
After the sardonic absurdity of ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, Dylan chose to start the second side of the album with his most luminous, meditative song yet. Begun on the 1964 cross-country trip, as his station-wagon left New Orleans for Texas on February 12 and completed a month or two later at the New Jersey home of his journalist friend Al Aronowitz (who claims to have rescued Bob’s discarded false starts from the wastebasket), ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ had been considered for inclusion on Another Side Of Bob Dylan. It had been recorded, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott providing harmonies on the choruses, at the June 9 session which produced that entire album, but was ultimately left off the record because Dylan “felt too close to it to put it on.”
While there’s no doubt that it would have sat well within Another Side Of Bob Dylan’s prevailing mood of ruminative melancholy, the song has an added strength and power on Bringing It All Back Home, where its plea for artistic liberation underlines the first side’s break with tradition. Not for nothing did Dylan choose to play this song and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ when he was called back to perform solo for a crowd who’d just booed his backing band offstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival: but what the audience, relieved at the sight of Dylan toting an acoustic guitar again, took as a mea culpa recanting of his rock experiment, was actually an implicit statement that, whatever they desired of him, he must follow his muse wherever it led him.
At the time, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ was widely considered to be a drug song, its exultant imagery and urge for transcendence seen as analogizing the psychedelic experience. What, such interpreters demanded, could “smoke rings of my mind” refer to, if not marijuana? And that request to “Take me on a trip…”—an LSD trip, surely? For most listeners, their first encounter with the song came via The Byrds’ hit single, and it’s easy to understand how the sleek, euphoric rush of their version might lead one to such a conclusion. But to impose such a narrow interpretation on the song is to miss its wider meaning, which has more to do with the artist’s invocation of his/her muse (here confusingly cast as a male figure, rather than the more usual female). That much is clear from Dylan’s own more haunted delivery, in which the desired transcendence is always slightly out of reach, an aim and an ideal, rather than an indulgence. It’s one of Dylan’s most mesmerizing performances, burnished with a wistful, gently swaying harmonica break which perfectly evokes the sense of lonely aesthetic reverie.
The first verse finds the writer, late at night, tired but unable to sleep, facing the blank page again. (The Clancy Brothers’ Liam Clancy, a folk-singing friend of Dylan’s from his early years in New York, told journalist Patrick Humphries that when he first heard Dylan sing the line about the “ancient empty street [that’s] too dead for dreaming,” he knew Bob was referring to “Sullivan Street on a Sunday”). In the second verse, the writer appeals for inspiration, “ready to go anywhere” his muse might lead, if (s)he should only “cast your dancing spell” his way. The third verse offers a reassurance that any “vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme” the muse might hear echoing his tambourine would merely be a “ragged clown” (the writer himself) chasing the elusive shadow of poetic perfection cast by the muse. Finally, in the fourth verse, the writer appeals again for an artistic experience outside the realms of memory and fate, beyond the bounds of time and place: a visionary experience in which the overwhelming immediacy of the aesthetic now obliterates more mundane, ego-directed notions of past, present and future.
Several sources have been claimed as the inspiration for the central pied-piper image of the tambourine man, though Dylan himself cites guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who attended an earlier recording session with a gigantic tambourine, “big as a wagon-wheel.” Fittingly, it’s Langhorne who provides the floating droplets of electric guitar which are the only accompaniment to Dylan’s own voice and rhythm guitar here.
Dylan admitted to Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston that his writing style was influenced by William Burroughs (“a great man”) and claimed that, like the beat author, he too collected photographs which illustrated his songs. “I have photographs of ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’,” he said. “I saw them after I wrote the songs. People send me a lot of things and a lot of the things are pictures, so other people must have that idea too.”
It’s hardly surprising that ‘Gates Of Eden’ should inspire visual responses, as the song contains some of Dylan’s most vivid, unsettling dream imagery, and may itself have been inspired by William Blake’s pictorial sequence The Gates Of Paradise. Like ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, each verse—virtually each couplet—stands on its own as a discrete tableau, combining to offer a devastating evocation of societal entropy. The song sets up hopeful expectations with the title ‘Gates Of Eden’, but it’s actually about an Eden from which paradise has been eroded: there is a terrible stench of decay and corruption about the imagery, and Dylan’s portentous delivery of each verse’s closing line offers a warning rather than a welcome. This Eden is a place to be avoided, where the best that can be expected is oblivion.
When he debuted the song at his New York Philharmonic Hall concert on October 31, 1964, Dylan introduced the song as “a sacrilegious lullaby in G minor,” a light-hearted description nevertheless borne out by the depiction of “Utopian hermit monks” sharing a saddle on the Golden Calf with “Aladdin and his lamp.” Religion, he seems to be suggesting, is composed of equal parts piety and magic, an unhealthy combination of morality, smoke and mirrors, whose protagonists’ “promises of paradise” raise only hollow laughter from Eden’s inhabitants.
Elsewhere, small-minded, gray-flanneled citizens are shocked by biker molls, impotent paupers chase materialist goals, industrialized cities remain impervious to babies’ cries, secretive kingmakers determine power relations and “friends and other strangers,” in an elegant twist on the notion of resignation, “from their fates try to resign.” Throughout, the catalogue of hardship and debasement is recurrently wiped clean at the end of each verse, rendered meaningless by the looming specter of the Gates Of Eden. Finally, the narrator is woken from his nightmare visions by his lover, who, like the beatific woman of ‘Love Minus Zero/ No Limit’, reports her own dreams without trying to decipher them; perhaps, he thinks, that is the best way to deal with his own visions, which seem somehow truer, more revealing of life, than strict narrative interpretations. After all, as he concludes, “there are no truths outside the Gates Of Eden.”
With its ponderous delivery, methodical strumming and bare arrangement—the only embellishment is a single windswept wheeze of harmonica planting a full-stop at the end of each verse—‘Gates Of Eden’ is the closest Dylan had come to an outright sermon since ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’-’; but compared with the clarity of that song’s well-targeted attack, this one offers only a troubling perception of general unease, a glimpse of a hell which we may already inhabit.
At almost six minutes long, the song was the perfect B-side partner for ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, adding extra layers of dense imagery to the A-side’s oblique character-assassination, and making it, at nearly 12 minutes in total, by far the longest single that had ever been released—a factor which added to the perception of Dylan as a serious young man with a lot to say.
(I’m Only Bleeding)
Though more direct in its imagery, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ shares the same sense of societal entropy as ‘Gates Of Eden’. But rather than disguise his critique behind clouds of allusion, here Dylan unsheathes his verbal dagger and plunges it squarely into the breast of contemporary American culture, in lines requiring little or no deciphering. The title itself is a sly multiple pun, recalling both Dylan’s own ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, the Arthur Crudup song which provided Elvis Presley with his breakthrough first single.
The opening image, of “Darkness at the break of noon,” echoes the title of Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist novel Darkness At Noon, suggesting that the human spirit can be cast into shade just as much by the rampant consumerism of a capitalist society in which manufacturers can make “everything from toy guns that spark/To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark,” as by the dead hand of communism. Corporate America and its Madison Avenue advertising industry thought-police, the song claims, are just as effective as communist brainwashing and show-trials in determining peoples’ attitudes and mapping out their psyches.
There follows a catalogue of capitalist shame in 15 verses, punctuated by four cautionary choruses. As with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, many lines were subsequently abstracted as slogans of the burgeoning counterculture: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” became the favored catchphrase of any scuffling hustler on the wrong end of a deal, while “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” was pronounced with grim glee at the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation. Most tellingly of all, “he not busy being born is busy dying” offered an update of the theme of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’-’ in which the target was switched, from the old and out-of-touch, to the young listeners themselves: only through the perpetual rebirth of new experience, the song suggested, could the pervasive entropy be staved off.
Like ‘Gates Of Eden’, the stripped-bare backing offers little distraction (or protection) from the words, which cut through the parade of hypocrisy and deceit like a machine-gun. Following the descending chord-sequence as it spirals abjectly away down the plughole, Dylan’s deadpan, declamatory delivery here is surely one of the most potent precursors of rap, though the occasional tug of nihilism glimpsed in lines like “There is no sense in trying” and “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to” is nowhere near as hopelessly final as the nihilism of contemporary hip-hop culture.
Despite this, ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ was undoubtedly one of the songs to which Joan Baez was referring when she criticized Dylan’s supposed nihilism and lack of what she saw as “commitment” during this period. She later admitted that, in the sour aftermath of their split, she couldn’t listen to his records from this period very often; if she had, she might have recognized that, far from abandoning the search for a solution to society’s problems, Dylan was laying the groundwork for that decade’s momentous changes of heart and mind with songs like ‘It’s Alright, Ma’.
As with his last two albums, Dylan chooses to close Bringing It All Back Home with a song casting off old allegiances, bidding farewell to attitudes and acquaintances that have slipped irrevocably from his orbit as he spins off in a new direction. Some thought it was written about Bob’s blue-eyed old friend Paul Clayton, though Dylan later denied this. The inspiration, he claims in the annotations for the Biograph box set, came from a much more innocent source, the Gene Vincent song ‘Baby Blue’, which had stuck in the back of his memory since he used to sing it back at Hibbing High School. “Of course,” he adds with droll superfluity, “I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”
We can well imagine that this different Baby Blue is likely to have been Joan Baez, judging by the retinue of dispossessed orphans, empty-handed painters and pestering vagabonds whose fates occupy so much of her concern. Alternatively, it could be a self directed piece, the singer coming to terms with the enormous changes taking place in his life and career, drawing new inspiration from the I Ching (“take what you have gathered from coincidence”), and attempting to escape from the pursuing hordes of followers and imitators “standing in the clothes that you once wore.” This last line would take on a devastating pertinence when, in a scene captured in the Don’t Look Back documentary of Dylan’s May 1965 tour of England, he played the song for Donovan during a party in his suite at the Savoy Hotel.
Whoever the song’s subject is, its resigned finality is streaked with tremendous pain and sadness, reflecting the strength of the ties being broken. Finally, after all the images of traumatic sunder, the song concludes with the invocation to “Strike another match, go start anew”—Dylan’s own acknowledgment that, whatever the pain involved, this end is but the start of a new chapter.